Why Do You Waste Your Time Here

WikiWiki's mission of providing an InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas was TargetReached a long time ago. Nowadays, it's nothing more than a social club. And a nasty social club at that.

Imagine a dinner party where most of the people there have bizarre, laughable opinions, and a good fifth of them have truly reprehensible ones (defending slavery, oppression or C++). Imagine that nothing new is being said, that you've been at the dinner party for so long that the same opinions are being offered again and again. And when they're not, it's because a couple of dweebs are exchanging esoterica on a subject you don't know and couldn't care less about. Imagine further that this dinner party is composed entirely of freaks who have no faces and no facial expressions.

Does this sound like a nightmare? Well, it's the actual situation here. So why do you waste your time here?? EscapeTheWiki?! ESCAPE THE WIKI!!

I waste my time here because it brings me joy. The history of programming ideas will continue as long as there are new programming ideas. There's nothing here to escape. We're all wasting time here voluntarily.

Why do you waste your time writing pages like this?

The only problem is there aren't any new programming ideas. Every idea of more than vanishing interest can be found in Lisp, circa 1970.

Then why isn't everybody using it?

The majority hasn't improved to the point of understanding it yet?

What makes you think they ever will?

The question was why "everyone" wasn't using LISP, not the intellectual growth of the masses.

[Note: everything is a waste of time.]

This site has always been devoted to the question, "why isn't everybody using it," for a wide variety of it. The question remains apropos so long as foolishness persists in our community. If the pace of serious contribution has slowed then I can only assume this is due to the same reason contributions have slowed to every computer conference, workshop and user interest group: work is tight and people are grumpy. If you are feeling grumpy and this site isn't helping then I wholeheartedly recommend a vacation. The good stuff will still be here when you return. -- WardCunningham

Ward += 4

The dearth of new programming ideas to discuss has been greatly exaggerated.